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by rhn_mk1 2122 days ago
Thank you, that's indeed what I meant.

The other, related issue is that reimplementing pieces of the shell DSL duplicates what can be done in the parent language.

Taking conditional return value as an example: "ls /nofile || true;"

In this case I don't really want to be given the option to use bash syntax for this. That would encourage the usage of shell idioms for "tricks" like control flow, which are another annoying part of the shell (I can never remember them). I would much prefer if there was a nice way to do that kind of things idiomatically in the parent language, and no other choice. E.g. to ignore the return value I would find it much nicer to be forced to do sth like this instead:

let _ = ls('nofile');

1 comments

since run_cmd! and run_fun! are returning result type, you can always do let _ = run_cmd!(ls nofile); to ignore single command error.

The “xxx || true” is for ignoring error within a group of commands, which is also very common in sh “set -e” mode. Without it, the group of commands need to be divided into at least 3 parts to still capture all possible command errors. I probably need to document this part with more details.

This ties in to what I wrote before: I prefer a philosophy where groups of commands are not written in the shell DSL, but are instead native statements (as much as possible), and the user is forced to use native control flow.

Documentation is not going to make me warm up to the idea, because I don't like having the choice to use the DSL so much.

With that in mind, perhaps I'm not the most valid person to provide criticism of this project ;)